Right before the link it says "... said last July that he wanted to amend". That should have put it in context right there. Of course that only works for people who can read text.
Download the data from the APNIC, TWNIC, KRNIC, etc. FTP sites, convert to your mailer's file format, and let it use that to look up each IP address. That's what I do for my Postfix mail servers.
I want to keep spam from even so much as entering my server. How can DCC help in that case? I don't see how, being as I don't have the content to check against DCC with. Now if this check can be done during the SMTP delivery of the content, and be used to force a failure of delivery, well maybe that would work. Is this doable? Last time I looked at the DCC site, it wasn't even close to this.
Lots of people here are libertarian. And many others are Libertarian. You know the difference. I'm in the first group (little 'l' libertarian). I do want to see a libertarian nation and a libertarian world. But I don't want to just suddenly throw some part into libertarian chaos without the rest to match it (to avoid the chaos). The road to becoming libertarian is not a smooth highway. It has to be achieved carefully, uniformly, and gradually. You can't just do it only in one or two countries, or one or two business sectors, else those will suffer due to the existing protectionism everywhere else. Instead, by gradually moving toward libertarianism uniformly, the problems inherint in the inconsistency can be avoided, and libertarianism can be made to work and be accepted by many more people. We should not cause a few to bear the costs of a lopsided change process. Just look what happened, and is happening, in Russia during its transition from a communist nation to a free market nation. It hasn't been smooth at least in part because it was too sudden.
When I'm making 20x the income as everyone else because I've fooled my employer into believing a bunch of bull, or because I'm blackmailing him somehow, then you can compare me to MPAA and RIAA. Then you can accuse me of their kind of protectionism of an extremely excessive reveune.
H-1B isn't fair competition. High tech workers incomes are more than just living costs; this money is planned for the future, too, such as early retirement. This "competition" is against people who have much lower costs of living because they don't plan to stay in this country (most H-1B workers go back to their home country with what is a stash relative to their costs, instead of staying here where it isn't all that much). That's not competition. The work should go to people who want to be here and stay here.
These are the same people who said that 450,000 jobs went >unfilled last year because there were not enough qualified technical people. Let's get some truth on the scene here (previously linked from slashdot here, here, and here). The ITAA is an industry spokes-puppet which is trying to spread a misconception that there is no jobs shortage, and that there is no unemployment, so that the industry can beg Congress for more slave labor force called H-1B. And I'm not referring to merely having more people than there are jobs. The real danger of the H-1B program the ITAA is constantly promoting is the fact that employees under this program:
are forced to work longer hours
are forced to work unusual conditions
are treated badly and with disrespect
cannot complain for fear of being deported
cannot change jobs for better conditions or higher pay
That last one is especially sinister because it means that the usual market forces, supply and demand, and competition for skills, is NOT allowed to function for H-1B workers, giving employers a windfall of what is essentially cheap slave labor. They are hired into jobs the employers claim require extended skills, and paid only the average programmer salary (not the near double amounts such skills would normally draw) because the H-1B law only requires the average to be paid based on all programmers (not specifically those with the required skills).
In other words, what the ITAA is spouting is a bunch of crock.
If someone comes to forcibly take your money away, that's a whole lot more than a nuisance. If you have to go downtown and sit around for 2-3 hours before you case comes up in court, to defend yourself, that's a whole lot more than a nuisance. Now I will say that most of the time, people are just trying to get through on the end of the yellow or the red when they could have stopped. But there are cases where people just get caught in the process, and the tighter some cities try to make this (just to generate more revenue) means the latter category of people becomes a greater percentage.
I certainly know that people do run red lights. One time I was number 3 waiting for a red to turn green. When it did, the 2 cars ahead went on and got through the intersection when a car from the cross road came through on their (assumed) red right in front of me (if I had been gunning it like the 2 cars ahead of me, it would have been a crash). The really sad part is that it was a woman with 2 kids in the back seat. Still, I'm also wise enough, and experienced enough, to know that not all incidents are true red-light runners.
One of the factors that needs to be included in yellow time duration is clearance time. This actualy increases with lowered speed limits, which DC is also working on enforcement for. Here in Texas, the yellow times of typically 4 seconds for 3 lane (each way, both) roads is most definitely NOT taking into account the clearance time.
And "go if the way is clear" for green is BS! Total BS! Absolute utter CRAPOLA! If everyone did that, the roadways would be gridlock with every car coming to a stop to make sure the intersection is totally clear before proceeding. If the traffic is running fast, that's not a problem, but during rush hour, that kind of stupidity can turn a 30 minute commute into a 2 hour commute. Clearing the tail on an interesection would take 1/20 the time as would be experienced if everyone stopped at every green during those slow commutes to do what you suggest. I'm glad as hell that 99.999% of motorists do NOT do anything as assinine as that.
Taking a piss during the commercials, or going to the kitchen to make a sandwich, is theft, too, with the logic Ted Turner is suggesting. What the PVR is probably doing is formally defining it and as a result, advertisers demand discounts on the basis of percentages assumed from sales of PVRs. More likely he's pissed off that business models are changing and he's past his prime in coming up with new business ideas to make money in the new ways.
And about this contract. I never made such an agreement in writing, nor have I ever seen even so much as an announcement of such at the beginning of the shows, such as "By continuing to watch, you hereby agree to view the commercials in the following programming, and not go to the bathroom or kitching, or fast forward". Is it really any different if I don't watch the commercials during the time of broadcast, or when the program is played back later when I get home?
If you hand code a new implementation every time you need to do sorting in C, then you are doing programming the wrong way. Ever heard of re-usable code? And if you limit you scope to the libraries that come with the languages, you're missing the potential. Look at PERL, for example. What comes with the language pales in comparison to all the cool stuff you can find online. And those things are used to promote the benefits of PERL.
I do note your focus on the indirection the stock qsort in the C library uses. Sure, it slows things down a bit. I guess I can count you in the group who says that Java and C# are completely worthless because of the much slower speed they operate?:-) Execution speed isn't everything all the time. Sometimes it is, but not all the time. And often, for cases where one might use qsort, there are often better ways to organize thing, anyway. If you have a huge array in memory that you need to sort, perhaps the design is all wrong in the first place.
Read my reply to the next peer reply. I meant to reply to this one, but accidentally replied to the next one, even though it was the very same point. Even though a language does have some warts (things to be avoided) doesn't mean we have to characterize a language on the basis of being required to use all those warts. I'd never use qsort except in a pinch. And since I've developed other things to use instead, it's never going to even happen, anyway. Any language is what you make of it. C can be a very powerful language. But you'd never know that if you compared the code of an experienced C++ programmer against the code of a beginning C programmer. There being very few programmers quite experienced in both, this makes it hard to realize (I'm not one of them, as my experience does not include C++).
I'm sure many people have dug up bad points about C++. But if those are things that good programmers avoid doing, then it doesn't merit saying that the language is bad for good programming by good programmers.
One general flaw I have found in many newer languages is that they allow, or attract, a great many beginners, and even more people who should really never have been programmers at all. They produce horrible code in any language, but can actually get something accomplished (even though not very good) in a small subset of a higher level language. Then we have bad examples that don't even meet the original specifications passing themselves off as implementations.
Every language has some bad features; things to be avoided. In fairness, we should compare best practices in C against best practices in C++, where the best practices is geared toward the specific goals (speed of execution, size of stored program, size of memory footprint, memory allocation usage, development time, reliability, readability (in context of a programmer skilled in that language) or whatever) one might have. I can assure you that qsort is among the many things in C to be avoided. Those things that are to be avoided in C++, should be as well, to be fair (but I don't know what they specifically are).
Part of the problem is that the products are designed so badly that there are many things they simply don't do right. So too often it simply cannot be fixed at all. No support script, no brilliant but rare techie, can have a hope of getting it fixed.
The reason these things are too often designed bad is because marketing (via CEO) puts pressure on engineering to release products before all the designs are fully implemented and tested. Or the engineering department itself is understaffed (Most CEOs prefer to hire more people into marketing than in engineering, because engineers are more likely to tell it the way it is, while marketing people are better at lying and brown nosing). The result is a crappy product, with poor documentation (for both the customer and the tech support people).
Unfortunately, the business climate requires this sort of practice, especially when it is growing rapidly, as was the case in the late 1990's. You have to release products quickly for no reason other than to prevent the customer from buying from the competition (which is certainly going to have similar problems, do to the same business pressures). The problem here is the business success models favor making the early sale and shipping garbage.
caller: Yesterday, I received the router we ordered last month. It simply doesn't work at all. support: Have you plugged it in and made all the appropriate connections? caller: The problem is, I can't do that. support: Well, you will need to plug it in and hook it up so we can perform diagnostics. caller: There is no place to hook it up. support: Then why did you buy a router? caller: No, I mean no ports on the router. support: Could you be a little more specific, sir? caller: The router is empty! support: What do you mean?.... (you can hear the tech support guy whispering to his supervisor "Another call for the 5000X") caller: I mean, this is an empty case. There's absolutely nothing inside, whatsoever. It's a metal shell with holes on the back. support: Oh, I think I understand now. I'm sorry you're having so much trouble with your new router. I'm going to transfer you over to the RMA department so you can get an authorization number to return it for repair. Don't worry, you have a full year warranty which will be extended for the duration your unit is being repaired. Thank you for calling FooBar Internet Devices.
Actually, prison labor was used by one company during an earlier economic slump back in the 1980's. Phone calls went like:
prisoner: It sounds like the dohicky is broken. Would you like us to ship you a replacement? caller: If that will make it work, then please do.
Prisoner: I'll need a credit card number to guarantee the return of your old dohickey. And what is your home address? And are you home at nights for late delivery?
I have found that the on-line tech support, usually in the form of FAQs (which should be called DQTKWOTs... dumb questions that keep wasting our time) generally don't help the situation at all. Part of the reason for this is that I am quite capable of figuring out everything that can be figured out on my own, with whatever information about the product that is available. Sometimes my diagnostic efforts simply need certain kinds of information they left out of the (ever shrinking, and more going the FAQ way) paper manual, and haven't figured out to put on the web site. I do give tech support the benefit of the doubt due to my own level of knowledge and skill. But I am quite unhappy when I email support and ask a very specific, deeply technical, question, and they fail to pass it on to the engineering team (because its beyond what tech support has information on). I have never gotten a response saying "Sorry, that is company confidential information which we are not allowed to release". Instead I usually get...
Thank you for contacting Foobar Widgets tech support. In order to serve you better, we have published help information on our website. Please visit http://support.foobarwidgets.com/faq.asp?q=1 where your problem will be answered. And don't forget to check out our new products at http://www.foobarwidgets.com/prod.asp?prodid=2002
I actually got a form letter like that when I was reporting a problem of being unable to access the web site at PayPal (sent to both support and webmaster). That's just dumb.
At least we can still get personal service in the confessional booth. But I worry how long even that will continue.
Would it be possible for the Adaware program to learn how to cripple, corrupt, or uninstall the audit software on the machine, or just take a flying jump to one of the many available GPFs or BSoDs available if it detects the auditware running?
What if a single individual professor does this for his own machine? I understand the uni said that this applies to machines owned by faculty, but what grants them the authority to do that? Their employment contract (I fully doubt that)? The uni would in fact be better off to NOT have faculty owned machines audited, so who allowed that to even get started? Some idiot in campus IT? The BSA itself? The thing here is to break the issue apart so that it is not the school saying yes or no, but each individual faculty member.
Back up your Windows box using raw sector by sector backup. This can be done with a Unix machine having the drive attached to it, or a Unix OS booted from CD on the host machine, using the dd command. You can transfer the mass of sectors to other storage media or over the network wherever you like. Now encrypt the backup. Then wipe the machine off so that every sector is written with binary zero. Finally, install Linux on the machine (Red Hat will be fine, for example) for the duration. Now's your chance to really diddle around with the system and see what happens when you do things like resetting it over and over without a clean shutdown, now that you have a sacrificial OS install. When the software police come around to check your machine, let them have a piece of that. Later, when the coast is clean, you can decrypt and restore your backed up copy by reversing the techniques previously used.
If you don't have the time to do this, or are just not sure you'd be able to get it back, then buy a new hard drive and swap it for the one in there now, and take the old hard drive home and hide it. You can still do the Linux install trick on the new hard drive during the investigation period, or just do a nice clean install of Windows from the legal copy you have the CD, book, license key, and that fancy shmancy authentication certificate for.
Re:The police sided with the customer.
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 2
This certainly can be true. In one case I believe I did not receive a job offer because I asked for specific details about the stock option plan. My mistake was asking in such a way that gave away that I knew how these things worked (and didn't want to get ripped off by ending up with only about $5000 worth of options at the end of 5 years). A lot of businesses tend to prefer to hire "happy consumer" types (the kind they can push around).
Slashdot Mirror
Your sig fits just fine. Try another. Thank you for using a sig.
Right before the link it says "... said last July that he wanted to amend". That should have put it in context right there. Of course that only works for people who can read text.
Download the data from the APNIC, TWNIC, KRNIC, etc. FTP sites, convert to your mailer's file format, and let it use that to look up each IP address. That's what I do for my Postfix mail servers.
I want to keep spam from even so much as entering my server. How can DCC help in that case? I don't see how, being as I don't have the content to check against DCC with. Now if this check can be done during the SMTP delivery of the content, and be used to force a failure of delivery, well maybe that would work. Is this doable? Last time I looked at the DCC site, it wasn't even close to this.
Lots of people here are libertarian. And many others are Libertarian. You know the difference. I'm in the first group (little 'l' libertarian). I do want to see a libertarian nation and a libertarian world. But I don't want to just suddenly throw some part into libertarian chaos without the rest to match it (to avoid the chaos). The road to becoming libertarian is not a smooth highway. It has to be achieved carefully, uniformly, and gradually. You can't just do it only in one or two countries, or one or two business sectors, else those will suffer due to the existing protectionism everywhere else. Instead, by gradually moving toward libertarianism uniformly, the problems inherint in the inconsistency can be avoided, and libertarianism can be made to work and be accepted by many more people. We should not cause a few to bear the costs of a lopsided change process. Just look what happened, and is happening, in Russia during its transition from a communist nation to a free market nation. It hasn't been smooth at least in part because it was too sudden.
When I'm making 20x the income as everyone else because I've fooled my employer into believing a bunch of bull, or because I'm blackmailing him somehow, then you can compare me to MPAA and RIAA. Then you can accuse me of their kind of protectionism of an extremely excessive reveune.
H-1B isn't fair competition. High tech workers incomes are more than just living costs; this money is planned for the future, too, such as early retirement. This "competition" is against people who have much lower costs of living because they don't plan to stay in this country (most H-1B workers go back to their home country with what is a stash relative to their costs, instead of staying here where it isn't all that much). That's not competition. The work should go to people who want to be here and stay here.
Your sig would fit if you spelled "truly" correctly.
These are the same people who said that 450,000 jobs went >unfilled last year because there were not enough qualified technical people. Let's get some truth on the scene here (previously linked from slashdot here, here, and here). The ITAA is an industry spokes-puppet which is trying to spread a misconception that there is no jobs shortage, and that there is no unemployment, so that the industry can beg Congress for more slave labor force called H-1B. And I'm not referring to merely having more people than there are jobs. The real danger of the H-1B program the ITAA is constantly promoting is the fact that employees under this program:
That last one is especially sinister because it means that the usual market forces, supply and demand, and competition for skills, is NOT allowed to function for H-1B workers, giving employers a windfall of what is essentially cheap slave labor. They are hired into jobs the employers claim require extended skills, and paid only the average programmer salary (not the near double amounts such skills would normally draw) because the H-1B law only requires the average to be paid based on all programmers (not specifically those with the required skills).
In other words, what the ITAA is spouting is a bunch of crock.
If someone comes to forcibly take your money away, that's a whole lot more than a nuisance. If you have to go downtown and sit around for 2-3 hours before you case comes up in court, to defend yourself, that's a whole lot more than a nuisance. Now I will say that most of the time, people are just trying to get through on the end of the yellow or the red when they could have stopped. But there are cases where people just get caught in the process, and the tighter some cities try to make this (just to generate more revenue) means the latter category of people becomes a greater percentage.
I certainly know that people do run red lights. One time I was number 3 waiting for a red to turn green. When it did, the 2 cars ahead went on and got through the intersection when a car from the cross road came through on their (assumed) red right in front of me (if I had been gunning it like the 2 cars ahead of me, it would have been a crash). The really sad part is that it was a woman with 2 kids in the back seat. Still, I'm also wise enough, and experienced enough, to know that not all incidents are true red-light runners.
One of the factors that needs to be included in yellow time duration is clearance time. This actualy increases with lowered speed limits, which DC is also working on enforcement for. Here in Texas, the yellow times of typically 4 seconds for 3 lane (each way, both) roads is most definitely NOT taking into account the clearance time.
And "go if the way is clear" for green is BS! Total BS! Absolute utter CRAPOLA! If everyone did that, the roadways would be gridlock with every car coming to a stop to make sure the intersection is totally clear before proceeding. If the traffic is running fast, that's not a problem, but during rush hour, that kind of stupidity can turn a 30 minute commute into a 2 hour commute. Clearing the tail on an interesection would take 1/20 the time as would be experienced if everyone stopped at every green during those slow commutes to do what you suggest. I'm glad as hell that 99.999% of motorists do NOT do anything as assinine as that.
Taking a piss during the commercials, or going to the kitchen to make a sandwich, is theft, too, with the logic Ted Turner is suggesting. What the PVR is probably doing is formally defining it and as a result, advertisers demand discounts on the basis of percentages assumed from sales of PVRs. More likely he's pissed off that business models are changing and he's past his prime in coming up with new business ideas to make money in the new ways.
And about this contract. I never made such an agreement in writing, nor have I ever seen even so much as an announcement of such at the beginning of the shows, such as "By continuing to watch, you hereby agree to view the commercials in the following programming, and not go to the bathroom or kitching, or fast forward". Is it really any different if I don't watch the commercials during the time of broadcast, or when the program is played back later when I get home?
If you hand code a new implementation every time you need to do sorting in C, then you are doing programming the wrong way. Ever heard of re-usable code? And if you limit you scope to the libraries that come with the languages, you're missing the potential. Look at PERL, for example. What comes with the language pales in comparison to all the cool stuff you can find online. And those things are used to promote the benefits of PERL.
I do note your focus on the indirection the stock qsort in the C library uses. Sure, it slows things down a bit. I guess I can count you in the group who says that Java and C# are completely worthless because of the much slower speed they operate? :-) Execution speed isn't everything all the time. Sometimes it is, but not all the time. And often, for cases where one might use qsort, there are often better ways to organize thing, anyway. If you have a huge array in memory that you need to sort, perhaps the design is all wrong in the first place.
Read my reply to the next peer reply. I meant to reply to this one, but accidentally replied to the next one, even though it was the very same point. Even though a language does have some warts (things to be avoided) doesn't mean we have to characterize a language on the basis of being required to use all those warts. I'd never use qsort except in a pinch. And since I've developed other things to use instead, it's never going to even happen, anyway. Any language is what you make of it. C can be a very powerful language. But you'd never know that if you compared the code of an experienced C++ programmer against the code of a beginning C programmer. There being very few programmers quite experienced in both, this makes it hard to realize (I'm not one of them, as my experience does not include C++).
I'm sure many people have dug up bad points about C++. But if those are things that good programmers avoid doing, then it doesn't merit saying that the language is bad for good programming by good programmers.
One general flaw I have found in many newer languages is that they allow, or attract, a great many beginners, and even more people who should really never have been programmers at all. They produce horrible code in any language, but can actually get something accomplished (even though not very good) in a small subset of a higher level language. Then we have bad examples that don't even meet the original specifications passing themselves off as implementations.
Every language has some bad features; things to be avoided. In fairness, we should compare best practices in C against best practices in C++, where the best practices is geared toward the specific goals (speed of execution, size of stored program, size of memory footprint, memory allocation usage, development time, reliability, readability (in context of a programmer skilled in that language) or whatever) one might have. I can assure you that qsort is among the many things in C to be avoided. Those things that are to be avoided in C++, should be as well, to be fair (but I don't know what they specifically are).
Part of the problem is that the products are designed so badly that there are many things they simply don't do right. So too often it simply cannot be fixed at all. No support script, no brilliant but rare techie, can have a hope of getting it fixed.
The reason these things are too often designed bad is because marketing (via CEO) puts pressure on engineering to release products before all the designs are fully implemented and tested. Or the engineering department itself is understaffed (Most CEOs prefer to hire more people into marketing than in engineering, because engineers are more likely to tell it the way it is, while marketing people are better at lying and brown nosing). The result is a crappy product, with poor documentation (for both the customer and the tech support people).
Unfortunately, the business climate requires this sort of practice, especially when it is growing rapidly, as was the case in the late 1990's. You have to release products quickly for no reason other than to prevent the customer from buying from the competition (which is certainly going to have similar problems, do to the same business pressures). The problem here is the business success models favor making the early sale and shipping garbage.
Actually, prison labor was used by one company during an earlier economic slump back in the 1980's. Phone calls went like:
I have found that the on-line tech support, usually in the form of FAQs (which should be called DQTKWOTs ... dumb questions that keep wasting our time) generally don't help the situation at all. Part of the reason for this is that I am quite capable of figuring out everything that can be figured out on my own, with whatever information about the product that is available. Sometimes my diagnostic efforts simply need certain kinds of information they left out of the (ever shrinking, and more going the FAQ way) paper manual, and haven't figured out to put on the web site. I do give tech support the benefit of the doubt due to my own level of knowledge and skill. But I am quite unhappy when I email support and ask a very specific, deeply technical, question, and they fail to pass it on to the engineering team (because its beyond what tech support has information on). I have never gotten a response saying "Sorry, that is company confidential information which we are not allowed to release". Instead I usually get...
I actually got a form letter like that when I was reporting a problem of being unable to access the web site at PayPal (sent to both support and webmaster). That's just dumb.
At least we can still get personal service in the confessional booth. But I worry how long even that will continue.
Would it be possible for the Adaware program to learn how to cripple, corrupt, or uninstall the audit software on the machine, or just take a flying jump to one of the many available GPFs or BSoDs available if it detects the auditware running?
What if a single individual professor does this for his own machine? I understand the uni said that this applies to machines owned by faculty, but what grants them the authority to do that? Their employment contract (I fully doubt that)? The uni would in fact be better off to NOT have faculty owned machines audited, so who allowed that to even get started? Some idiot in campus IT? The BSA itself? The thing here is to break the issue apart so that it is not the school saying yes or no, but each individual faculty member.
Like the subject says. That's what the letters BSA really means.
Back up your Windows box using raw sector by sector backup. This can be done with a Unix machine having the drive attached to it, or a Unix OS booted from CD on the host machine, using the dd command. You can transfer the mass of sectors to other storage media or over the network wherever you like. Now encrypt the backup. Then wipe the machine off so that every sector is written with binary zero. Finally, install Linux on the machine (Red Hat will be fine, for example) for the duration. Now's your chance to really diddle around with the system and see what happens when you do things like resetting it over and over without a clean shutdown, now that you have a sacrificial OS install. When the software police come around to check your machine, let them have a piece of that. Later, when the coast is clean, you can decrypt and restore your backed up copy by reversing the techniques previously used.
If you don't have the time to do this, or are just not sure you'd be able to get it back, then buy a new hard drive and swap it for the one in there now, and take the old hard drive home and hide it. You can still do the Linux install trick on the new hard drive during the investigation period, or just do a nice clean install of Windows from the legal copy you have the CD, book, license key, and that fancy shmancy authentication certificate for.
OK, who's the troll that snapped a flash picture of their web site? Seems the thing has exploded and is no longer up.
It's not piracy at all ... it's "distributed buying"!
What label is that? "Troll Records"?
This certainly can be true. In one case I believe I did not receive a job offer because I asked for specific details about the stock option plan. My mistake was asking in such a way that gave away that I knew how these things worked (and didn't want to get ripped off by ending up with only about $5000 worth of options at the end of 5 years). A lot of businesses tend to prefer to hire "happy consumer" types (the kind they can push around).